Email Marketing Metrics Report

Click-to-Open Rates

October 2015 Edition

Click-to-open rate (CTOR) is a key metric in measuring campaign performance. It basically describes: of the people who opened a message, how many clicked links within it. In this way, CTOR zeroes in on the message content, providing a valuable indication of how well the copy and creative performed.

Since the calculation of CTOR relies on open rate, which is only an approximation, CTOR is also an approximation. In addition, like a message's click rate, CTOR depends on several variables, such as industry, segmentation, email type, and number of links. Given the nature of CTOR, there is no single benchmark for success. However, promotional emails may achieve CTORs between 20% and 30%. If a campaign's CTOR drops below this, then the email marketer should look into improving the quality and relevance of their message content.

Calculating a click-to-open rate: The click-to-open rate of an email campaign is calculated by dividing the number of unique clicks by the number of unique opens. The resulting value is then represented as a percentage.

Average Click-to-Open Rate by Industry

This graph shows a comparison of average CTOR across 33 different industries. Transportation produced the highest average CTOR of 22.7%. Recruitment and Staffing dropped down to second place with an average rate of 21.4% — nearly half of what it was in 2013. Hobbies remained in third place, earning an average CTOR of 20.2%. The industries which received the lowest average CTORs were Restaurant, Bar and Night Club (4.5%); Architecture and Construction (4.9%); and Healthcare (5.3%).